Just how great a poet was Walt Whitman, a man of slight beard, compared to Samuel Morse, a poet as well as an inventor, whose massive Garibaldi Elongated–style beard embodied nearly three times the gravitas of Whitman's? Purportedly reproducing the exacting analysis found in "Poets Ranked by Beard Weight," a rare pamphlet of Edwardian arcana by Upton Uxbridge Underwood, this tongue-in-cheek miscellany of beard lore considers the life and career of the beard-obsessed Underwood, inventor of the pogonometer. His founding principles of pogonology—that the texture, contours, and growth patterns of a man's beard indicate personality traits, aptitudes, and character—are examined in hilarious detail.